Product Description

A pie is a thin bread dough, shortcrust pastry or puff pastry filled with meat, vegetables or seasonal fruits and baked or fried.
They say it dates back to the custom of cooking bread filled with meat or vegetables, so that shepherds and travelers could eat them on the go. This type of preparation led to dishes like Italian calzone, Galician pies and British Cornish pasties; perhaps similarly they emerged as Tunisian briks, Turkish börek, and lahmayun, sfihas and Arab fatayer.

We naturally do not add any meat or fish. We make them with seasonal vegetables, but the most successful one is tomato, onion and Mediterranean herbs. The individual size pie is ideal for a picnic or office tupper or for dinner with a salad. You can find information about the Strudel (which is a variant of the coca closed) at http://www.pastelvegano.com/en/productos/strudel/

And where does the pie come from?

In the Middle Ages one of the most important objectives of these preparations was preserving meat, since cooking in a mass the protecting several days (there was no electricity nor fridges). At that time, in Spain pies were made with dough of wheat or rye. They were filled with meat or fish and game, often with leftover stew.
In Llibre de Coch, a Catalan cookbook published in Barcelona in 1520, Ruperto de Nola mentions a pie stuffed with tuna, trout and eel.
Pies are found in all cultures:
In Asia are small and vertical, individual size. In Korea the “mandu” is eaten in soup.
In America they are larger and flattened, individual too, with drawings in the repulgue, sweet and savory.
In Europe pies are usually larger for sharing (other than the dumplings) and can also be sweet and savory. In Spain the best known ones are from Galicia, the Balearic formatjades, dumplings and cocarrois de Mallorca.
The flour used for the dough is the local ingredient: rice in Asia, corn in America, wheat or rye in Europe.
The National Empanada Festival is held annually in the city of Famaillá (Tucuman, Argentina). In the city of Salta they celebrate the Pie Contest every July.
Pies are such a popular dish in Colombia where they have even dedicated monuments in its honour in the city of Caicedonia and in the city of Manizales.
In Russia and Ukraine the traditional pirozhki (or pirožki) is stuffed with salmon or caviar.
Phyllo pastry was actually developed around the year 1500 in the Ottoman Empire, which is used to make the baklava, and also Boreks dumplings. Through the Turks the pastry reached other European cuisines, giving birth to the Greek spanakopita, the Austrian Strudel and Hungarian retes.